President-elect Barack Obama is poised to move swiftly to reverse actions that President Bush took using executive authority, and his transition team is reviewing limits on stem-cell research and the expansion of oil and gas drilling, among other issues, members of the team said Sunday.

Clearly, much more needs to be reviewed besides the issues mentioned above, but for a guy who's more than a month from taking office, this is a very encouraging start.

Today's election is poised to end the Republican era in American politics - an era that began in reaction to Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, the Vietnam war and the civil rights revolution, was pioneered by Richard Nixon, consolidated by Ronald Reagan, and wrecked by George W Bush.

Almost every aspect of the Republican ascendancy has been discredited and lies in tatters - its policies, politics, and even its version of patriotism - down to the rock-bottom notion that progressive taxation itself, initiated by a Republican president, Theodore Roosevelt, who John McCain hails as his personal icon, is unpatriotic.

...

Now, certain factors that have dominated US politics for 40 years seem destined to recede to the far corners. In economics, supply-side panaceas and deregulation created the worst crisis since the Great Depression, requiring a conservative Republican administration to part-nationalise banks, something unimaginable under any Democratic administration. In foreign policy, neoconservatism led to the morass in Iraq and Afghanistan while undermining the western alliance. In social policy, the evangelical right battered science, the separation of church and state, and the right to privacy. Finally, the conservative principle of limited government has become a watchword for incompetence, cronyism, corruption, hypocrisy, and contempt for the rule of law.

Really, read the whole thing. It hits both the macro level of decades of history, and the micro level of the campaign itself.

As Election Day approaches, and as an Obama victory looks more probable, the McCain campaign is serving as the focus of an untrammeled and vitriolic collective id. Lots of these people are just scared shitless that a black man might sit in the White House.

Celeste Carey interviews Enola Aird, founder of the intra-racial healing organization, Community Healing Network. They discuss how Black people throughout the African Diaspora can destroy the poisonous dehumanizing lie of Black inferiority. Enola and other community activists constructed a multifacted approach to reclaim and assert the accomplishments, wisdom and beauty that is the true heritage of people of the African Diaspora.

Frederick Lane, author of the book The Court and the Cross: The Religious Right's Crusade to Reshape the Supreme Court, and host Linda Olson-Osterlund discuss the November election, Sarah Palin and the effect the outcome of the election will have on America's future. For more go to www.fredericklane.com